Here is how the US House of Representatives voted today on the bill “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act (HR 4038).” This is in reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris and how/if Syrian refugees will be processed in the United States. President Obama has said that the US will take in 10,000, of the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the war in Syria and other war-torn countries like Iraq.

The bill passed. This vote was recorded on November 19, 2015 at 1:55PM.

The basic gist is that a white neighbor called the police because he thought a hispanic person was breaking into an apartment. It was Wells, she’s not hispanic, and she was locked out of her apartment and needed the services of a locksmith. Regardless, 19 Santa Monica police officers flooding the scene, Wells’s apartment, guns drawn with dogs.

The only excuse for the overwhelming force given to Wells was that sometimes people kill cops. Really? A potentially petty property crime is underway and these heavily armed police officers are that afraid for their lives that they treat every situation like a military operation in downtown Baghdad?

Wells survived the ordeal, but had she made one wrong move – those officers had their guns aimed at her chest – she’d be dead.

And how many times does the interaction between scared white cops and people of color start just like that? Guns drawn, ready to loc ’em and smoke ’em. When will the Department of Justice step up to the plate and shut this shit down? People are dying every day because of this nonsense. End militarization of the police and shut down police departments that can not function as they should, helping and protecting the community – all of the community.

If a department is not truly committed to community policing, with cops living and working and walking the streets on their beat, shut it down. It’s over. Now. That’s what Loretta Lynch needs to do today.

Papa. Papa! His fat little finger points to the guitar resting on its stand. Tar-tar. I pick it up. He sits next to me with his blue plastic guitar and we play. I stop because my fingers ache, is it early stages of arthritis? He signs “more” and says tar-tar. I play more. He watches. He listens. He dances. Sometimes he even sings. I’m papa.

I can’t believe he just said that immigrants are rapists. He’s running to be the president of the United States of America – a nation of immigrants. Did he really say that? Does he mean that? Were people clapping because they agree with him or because they know that his presence is another sign that the end of time, at least our time, is oh so very near?

September 11, 2001 is a day I’ll never forget. And now, 14 years later, we still have no better understanding of what happened then we did then. If you’ve read the 9/11 Commission Report, it leaves many questions simply unanswered – it’s a white wash.

Today, Politico has an interesting story that includes this sentence about a closed-door meeting in which the CIA warned the White House that an attack was imminent.

“Although Tenet brought up this meeting in his closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commission, it was never mentioned in the committee’s final report.”

I’m not a “truther,” but I want the truth. And for me, that truth includes investigating what happened in the World Trade Towers in the days and weeks before those planes struck, killing nearly 3,000 people. The fact that the 9/11 Commission never even investigated whether explosives were planted in the buildings is shocking. There were eye witnesses that said there were explosions in the basement in at least one of the towers that killed people and blew out windows in the lobby.

Maybe it was all bullshit, but the fact that the 9/11 Commission didn’t even consider that scenario a reasonable possibility is highly suspicious. They didn’t investigate it.

And now, as Politico is reporting, the CIA was aggressively and repeatedly warning the Bush administration that an attack was imminent, and that those warnings were not only ignored, but there’s been a concerted effort to make it seem like those warnings never even happened.

Someone needs to get to the bottom of all of this. A truly independent investigation needs to happen now. We lost 3,000 people on that autumn day. And we lost thousands more in the wars that followed. We gutted many of our rights to privacy. We created a massive domestic military and law enforcement agency. We need to know what really happened while those responsible are still alive to be prosecuted and thrown in jail. We need it now.

But go ahead, just laugh and call me a “truther,” but if you believe the Bush Administration’s bullshit lies, you’re simply being foolish.

This is getting beyond cliche. The World Net Daily, a rabid anti-progressive dumping ground for the ignorant class is doing its best to delegitimize the Mizzou protesters by, you guessed it, calling them liars.

Douglas Ernst, a former employee of Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, wrote that Mizzou student protesters Payton Head and Jonathan Butler are full of shit.

Here’s his evidence.

Head hastily posted to social media on Wednesday that there were KKK members on campus and that they were looking for black people to harm. It’s not clear where Head got that information, but it was proven to be inaccurate and he later apologized for the error.

On Facebook, Head wrote, “I’m sorry about the misinformation that I have shared through social media. In a state of alarm, I was concerned for all students of the University of Missouri and wanted to ensure that everyone was safe. I received and shared information from multiple incorrect sources, which I deeply regret.”

How is Butler a liar?

According to Ernst, it’s because his father is an executive at Union Pacific Railroad, and reportedly earns more than $8 million a year. What does that information, while mildly interesting data to include on a Wikipedia page, have anything to do with the University of Missouri’s race problems?

And now for the big lie that tears at the very essence of what the Mizzou students, athletes and faculty are protesting about, which is poop — particularly the so-called feces swastika.

“Perhaps the most egregious claim by students at the University of Missouri,” according to Ernst, “involves a story of a swastika made out of human waste.”

I’ll admit it, if this shit smearing did happen, there would probably be a few photos of it floating around on Twitter, but I’ve not seen one. So there’s a reasonable chance that the poop swastika never happened.

But is this what we’re supposed to believe is the reason for Butler’s hunger strike, which began before the poop story dropped? Because this campus rumor exploded onto the national press, it invalidates — or delegitimizes — all of the grievances that these students and faculty are petitioning the administration for redress?

It’s a textbook tactic that the best way to destroy your opponent isn’t to challenge their specific arguments, but rather, just paint them as liars. The right does the same thing to Hillary Clinton. They do the same thing to President Obama. She’s sneaky. He’s not even an American. And now at Mizzou, or the greater Black Lives Matter movement, they’re liars. They can’t be trusted. What they’re saying is invalid and not even worth responding to.

And this strategy works well for the right because the conservative media echo chamber runs with it every time. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and all of the fringe publications like World Net Daily blast away at their enemy until there is nothing left but a pack of liars whose grievances are invalid. Game. Set. Match.

Unfortunately, the mainstream news media follow along and provide the necessary credibility to the right’s attacks, and once that happens, it’s over. The status quo remains intact.

I couldn’t believe it when I woke up this morning and saw the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel joining in on the delegitimize-black-student protesters tip.

Weigel had retweeted a story by Breitbart News with the headline “The Missouri Poop Swastika is the Moment Social Justice Jumped the Shark.” The rightblogger, Milo Yiannopoulos claims that all of the issues Mizzou students are raising are all lies.

“It seems more likely that the swastika is a hoax, just as — whisper it — so many other high-profile black victims on American campuses celebrated endlessly by progressive journalists turn out to be mendacious frauds,” Yiannopoulos wrote.

It’s the age-old tactic of the regressive — delegitimize your opponent. Simply claim that there’s no racial prejudice in Missouri, or anywhere for that matter, it’s all lies from the pit of hell.

Let’s think that through.

What would be the point of making up a bunch of stories, protesting and going on a hunger strike? Because the students really hated the president that much that they would go to these lengths in order to oust him? That seems unlikely. So what is their motive then? Yiannopoulos doesn’t say.

But you can see where Yiannopoulos is coming from in his use of the word “retard” in the story. He’s a “libertarian.” I assume that’s why Weigel, former Reason writer thinks Yiannopoulos is cool. But is that what it takes to be a libertarian today? Just be an asshole?

I agree that there’s more to the Mizzou story than poop smeared on a wall, but this story by Yiannopoulos does nothing to increase our understanding of what’s been happening on the campus for the last two years. Or why these folks are so upset. Investigating that would take work, it’s much easier for to just call the students and protesters liars and move on, right?

I don’t expect more from Breitbart News, but for a supposedly serious Washington Post reporter like Dave Weigel to give this sort of pathetic attempt to delegitimize the plight of these students is very sad indeed.

In a panel discussion that included a grand total of eight talking heads on “Morning Joe” today, host Joe Scarborough is flummoxed to understand why the University of Missouri students are so upset.

It couldn’t be the lack of a sufficient response to a black student being called a “nigger,” or a swastika smeared on a campus wall in human feces, or the college president himself aggressively driving his car through a group of Black Lives Matter protesters. Clearly the students felt that the university administration was failing to create culture on campus that espoused inclusiveness rather than divisiveness. Their complaints were not being heard.

But Scarborough couldn’t see it.

“What are the specifics? I’ve been reading since this photograph was taken, looking for specifics of systemic actions that have made students feel excluded,” Scarborough said to Pulitzer Prize winner journalist Eugene Robinson, who sadly, agreed with Scarborough.

It’s a play from the same old playbook. The slightest slight directed at white Christians, like Starbucks holiday cups that don’t have reindeer on them is valid and an atrocity, but outright unaddressed racism directed at black people, there needs to be much, much more proof that someone has been wronged.

What has Greer so fearful is that following the successful protests at University of Missouri this week, spurred by several on-campus racist instances, this is only the beginning, as black athletes across the country may demand justice too.

Quoting The Daily Caller’s comrade-in-arms Breitbart News, Greer wrote, “Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos aptly noted how similar the Yale incident resembled the actions of Mao Zedong’s notorious Red Guards. The Mizzou incident proves that this disturbing activity isn’t limited to New Haven. And in Columbus, the activists got the scalp they so desired.”

For the record, Zedong is responsible for the deaths of as many as 45 million people during his more than three decades in office.

But Greer even scoffs at the students complaints, one which includes the smearing of human feces on a wall in the shape of a swastika.

“The fact that anyone would consider a poop swastika the work of neo-Nazis is pretty deluded,” Greer wrote. “Nazis may love brown shirts, but that doesn’t mean they like to draw their honored icon out of brown matter.”

Ba-da-bump.

Apparently Greer is tapped into the thought-process of neo-Nazis. These poop-smearing neo-Nazis must not be real neo-Nazis.

And as for the “alleged” incidents of harassment, one which a black student was called a “nigger.” Greer said, “It’s also not within a university’s jurisdiction to punish speech.”

From there Greer calls the student athletes rapists and espouses sympathy for frat boys in Oklahoma who were expelled after being caught on tape happily singing about lynching black people.

”The expulsion,” he wrote, “was a gross violation of the students’ constitutional rights and would likely be easily dismissed in court.”

I could go on, but doing so would only give Greer more credibility than he deserves. His opinion piece is a laundry list of the most common and hackneyed attempts to distract, diminish, and degrade black people seeking justice by speaking truth to power.

When I was a reporter in Vermont I got a chance to meet Senator Bernie Sanders a few times. He often gave town hall meetings to discuss Social Security, or cuts to the Post Office or LIHEAP. My impression is that Sanders is the real deal. I agree with Matt Taibbi, it is we who are fucked up.

I first met Bernie Sanders ten years ago, and I don’t believe there’s anything else he really thinks about. There’s no other endgame for him. He’s not looking for a book deal or a membership in a Martha’s Vineyard golf club or a cameo in a Guy Ritchie movie. This election isn’t a game to him; it’s not the awesomely repulsive dark joke it is to me and many others.

And the only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair.

Not all of us can say that. But that doesn’t make us right, and him “unrealistic.” More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It’s the rest of us who are lost.